Elementary School

Grades 3 - 5

In the Elementary School, we cultivate our students’ burgeoning sense of individuality while promoting their understanding of community. From assemblies focused on character virtues to our Internet Safety Campaign, from collaborative projects to the fifth grade milestone of owning a Tablet PC, our students grow to understand the tensions and benefits of being an autonomous individual and being a part of something larger.

Our curriculum is geared toward cultivating a sense of self and a sense of others. Toward that end, our students on any given day may be enaged in:

• thinking through their own personal philosophy after reading Tuck Everlasting
• simulating a mini-community, electing government officials from their ranks and pushing community agendas
• investigating regionalism as part of a study of American geography
• working in pairs to sequence and narrate visual representations of the pilgrims’ journey to America
• role playing as Millie and Jackson, the main characters in our year-long investigation into Internet safety
• creating physical models celebrating the selfless service of soldiers in World War II
• voice recording personal preferences in French
• trying their first lab practicals, diagnosing seed development problems in science
• creating both individual and collaborative works of art for display in the Upper School

In grades three and four, our students spend the majority of the day with their homeroom teachers, providing a continuity to the day and a teacher who oversees student development. For language (French or Spanish), arts, physical education, and science, they spend time with specialists, but their interdisciplinary study of language arts, social studies, and mathematics occurs within the contained unit of a homeroom.

In grade five, our students begin to explore beyond the limits of homeroom, heading to different classes for language arts, mathematics, and social studies in addition to the other specialties. In this break-through year, our students also receive their first Tablet PCs, learning responsibility through our TechKnow classes - a bi-weekly exploration into software, hardware, and care of these powerful learning tools.

All Elementary School students meet for assembly once a week as a full division to connect with each other and to share insights into our core values, to enjoy a performance, or even to perform themselves in our annual spelling bee or our all-ages talent show.